Film: Lis Rhodes, A Cold Draft
To accompany our exhibition by Lis Rhodes, Dissident Lines, we will be screening additional works all day, on four Saturdays across June and July, in the Space on the ground floor. Each film will be shown on a loop with some Hang on a Minute films screened as interludes.
A Cold Draft (1998) layers text, image and voice to explore the socio-political landscape of Britain in the 1980s. The film describes the shift from state-controlled institutions to privatisation and economic reform under the Conservative government and the leadership of Margaret Thatcher. Against this political backdrop, Rhodes narrates the story of a female protagonist who is under surveillance and has been deemed mad. Rhodes describes the woman’s dissatisfaction with the domesticity and administration of daily life and asks: is she really mad? Or is she fed up with a life defined by domestic activity? Throughout the film, Rhodes’s voice moves between defiance and defeat. Statements such as “Heroes are heroic and heroines die”, and “Resistance had been turned into acceptance” come to embody a chorus of repressed subjects enduring political and social oppression.